Restaurant Tech and Mobile: 7 Questions with Anthony Lye

Mobile technology is coming hard and fast and it’s starting to make a real difference in restaurant operations. I had the chance to speak with Anthony Lye, chief product officer at Red Book Connect, which offers a suite of solutions to help restaurant managers control costs, improve profitability, manage staff, and facilitate real time communication. […]

Mobile technology is coming hard and fast and it’s starting to make a real difference in restaurant operations.

I had the chance to speak with Anthony Lye, chief product officer at Red Book Connect, which offers a suite of solutions to help restaurant managers control costs, improve profitability, manage staff, and facilitate real time communication.

We dug into the profound changes being delivered via smartphones and tablets these days. Here is part of our conversation…

Jaime: Anthony, you are in a very interesting spot right now, this nexus of digital and mobile technology, which are both just explosive areas. So, talk about where we are today in terms of restaurant business technology.

Anthony: You have an industry that’s been starved of technology. You’re not going to find an Oracle or an SAP or a Microsoft really giving these guys what they want. Restaurants are different places; they’re not like Telcos or banks, and so, for me, what I think is fascinating about this market is, number one, it’s huge: there are about 10 million restaurants in the world, and 1 in every 10 people in the United States works in a restaurant. But they’ve never really had the kinds of tools, the software, that could improve their efficiency that could improve their effectiveness.

And that’s really because the technology just wasn’t ready; there wasn’t really a format that they could consume until now, and that catalyst, that disrupter, is mobile. You’re not going to see white collar workers sitting behind PCs in a restaurant. You’re going to see a very mobile and very active workforce in the front of house as well as in the back of house. We just really believe that smartphones and tablets are really the perfect platform that enables us, for the first time really, to deliver the kind of solution that could improve on the very metrics that drive the industry.